charles wrote:
In article ,
tony sayer wrote:

OK .. there is an outfit round here who has a hard drive "mincer" it
does just that . His firm collects PC's takes the hard drives out and
puts them in a machine that literally minces them into small chunks!..

We once tried to wreck some hard drives but hitting them with a hammer
and throwing them at the floor not dropping them, throwing them. It was
very surprising just how robust they were even with that treatment.

when I took the hard drive out of a desktop machine I then undid some
screws and removed the cover and then the disk. It can be bent by putting
it in vice and htting it witha hammer. Some of the coating flakes off, too.

cheaper than paying someone to use a 'mincer'.

I really have never fathomed out why people are so paranoid about
what's left on their disk drives. The same stuff is almost certainly
spread all around the internet anyway and a proper low level format
will erase sufficiently that no one except MI5/MI6 will have the time,
money and equipment to get any data off the drive.

--
Chris Green